


you, my brown-eyed girl

by aireyv



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Abrupt Ending, Fluff, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, animal injury, explicit animal death, flashback to childhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 08:03:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13632132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aireyv/pseuds/aireyv
Summary: David’s foster father said a trap was useless if you get there and your kill’s been dead for twenty hours already - even worse if it wasn’t dead, and was suffering the whole time.





	you, my brown-eyed girl

**Author's Note:**

> Yes I'm participating in the Winter Games despite all the shit that's happened to me recently! (If you know my tumblr or twitter, please go there because... you know... important updates and all...) While this is technically yet another old #MGS Offscreen scrap, I did rework it enough that I feel it should qualify. Prompt: _"Dogs"_

_When David was six, he lived with an honest, hard-working family in rural Iowa. They grew their own vegetables and hunted for their own meat. Hunting meant traps. Traps meant checking them every day, twice or three times a day usually. David’s foster father said a trap was useless if you get there and your kill’s been dead for twenty hours already - even worse if it wasn’t dead, and was suffering the whole time._

_David ran ahead today. He ran ahead to the next trap, following a low, pained keen that he didn’t know what meant. There was a fox in the trap, with red fur and about half as tall as David, blood-streaked and drooling, the tines of the trap caught high on its leg._

_It growled at David. David stepped back. There was a powerful desperation in the fox’s eyes, a demand to be freed, a demand to die with dignity._

_David called for his foster father, but he was out of earshot. He didn’t know what to do. Normally, he was pretty sure, his foster father would have shot it in the head, ended its suffering, or maybe release it if the wound was something it could limp away from. David didn’t think this was something it could limp away from. This was more blood than he’d ever seen in his life and the rattling wheezing the fox made sounded oddly… final._

_So he waited. He waited until the growling stopped, then the wheezing stopped, then the fierce light in the fox’s eyes faded and it was dead. David had never seen anything die before. He was six; he’d never even really_ thought _about death before._

_He had just watched something die, alone, in pain, without comfort, without freedom, and for the first time he realized his place in the world: just another living thing that would, too, eventually die alone without comfort or freedom._

_David didn’t stay with that foster family for too long after that._

Looking into the dog’s eyes, Snake remembered that easily. The untamed desperation in its eyes now was the same as the fox’s back then, the exact same demand to be let loose or else to die and be freed of the pain of the trap’s tines digging deep into flesh, streaking its gray fur red with blood.

Snake raised his hands. The dog growled, snapping.

“Easy,” Snake said, “easy.” He moved slowly, reaching for the trap, and the dog watched him warily, still growling, but softer now. Snake pulled the trap off its leg and it bolted - or attempted to, anyway. It managed to lope away a few steps, dripping blood all over the snow, then stumbled, crashing to the ground. It tried to get up, several times, but its badly injured leg just couldn’t bear its weight.

Snake walked over to it. It growled at him again, then barked, a warning. Left alone, this dog would probably die - either eaten alive by other opportunistic predators, or else the slow and painful death of starvation. He pulled out his knife - he would have liked to bring a gun but he had a tendency of firing it if he started hallucinating, and even if he was isolated enough that it was _unlikely_ , accidentally shooting someone would still bring the world back down on his head - then, slowly… put it back.

The dog was young, barely older than a puppy. It had too much life ahead of it - too much life _in_ it - for a mercy kill to be anything other than tragic.

The dog snapped at him again when Snake reached for its ears, then stopped, almost confused, when Snake stroked them.

“Easy there,” Snake said, feeding it a bit of jerky, which it hungrily snapped up. “It’d be a waste for you to die now, wouldn’t it?”

He brought the dog back to his cabin, having easily won her trust with a few more pieces of jerky. She seemed to take to him. Snake cleaned and bandaged her leg - it really was a bad wound, but probably survivable as long as Snake kept a close eye on it - and he thought, _If an animal likes me, I can’t really be all_ that _bad, can I?_

The dog seemed to think so.

Well, sort of. She cooperated with Snake as far as her leg went, and was always there when food was involved (even if it wasn’t food for dogs), but other than that she skulked around the house, avoiding Snake, hiding from him, and while she always returned when he let her out, she never let Snake get close to her out there. Snake had expected this. She was wild, after all, not just a stray but a feral dog who had grown up away from humans, and hell, it looked like she was at least half wolf, too.

But even if he hadn’t even thought of a name to call her (just calling her “girl” when he talked to her), he still appreciated having her around because he hadn’t quite realized how _lonely_ he was until now. Which was exactly why he occasionally talked to a wolfdog.

And one night he was woken up from a nightmare by the dog licking his cheek. She was looking at him with as much concern in her eyes as any human had ever looked at Snake with, but her care was something simpler, more primal. More honest.

“Guess we’re just taking care of each other, huh, girl?” Snake said, scratching her behind the ears. She wagged her tail.


End file.
